


someone still loves you

by LadyAlice101



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, at least this garbage is better than THAT garbage and i didn't spend any money on it lmao, i don't even, sigh, this is my fic of tears, what
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 11:12:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18893467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyAlice101/pseuds/LadyAlice101
Summary: She knows the Lord’s mutter about her and her wildling lover, and they perhaps even suspect the truth of his identity, but he’s not her lover, not really. She just wants him to be.-Post canon and no one can convince me that something like this DOESN'T happen





	someone still loves you

**Author's Note:**

> Asdfgghjkl I couldn’t help myself, even tho pol!jon is dead and I fucking tried to keep this canon compliant I couldn’t do it all the way 
> 
> Also what the fuck. What the fuck. I. ugh. Just. 
> 
> I cried while writing this bc I started immediately after the episode aired. So. Enjoy my tears. 
> 
> ps dw i'm still hard at work on victory is in my veins and it is now my offical s8 alternative

There are two things that Sansa remembers most about the Wall and Castle Black.

She remembers Jon. She remembers exactly how it had felt when he’d embraced her when she’d first arrived, she remembers sitting by the fire and eating soup and drinking ale with him, she remembers lying in his bed while he sat by the fire or stood watch, and she remembers feeling the safest and most loved that she had since she’d first left Winterfell. She remembers Jon.

The other thing she remembers is the view from the top of the Wall. The True North, Jon had called it, when he’d taken her up there on her second day at Castle Black. She remembers thinking it was beautiful. The jagged mountains, the sparkling snow. She remembers thinking it would be peaceful, up there, free of expectations and politics.

When she looks over it now, as Queen in the North, there is no less beauty, but there is more pain.

Her heart _aches._

It aches, and aches, and aches, and even though she knows she might be seeing him soon, she so desperately wishes that this weren’t the way that it had turned out.

Sansa doesn’t have to wait long. Before long, she spots riders coming from the trees. There’s a group of them, though from this high up she can’t make out how many.

She turns to her guard, Allister. He is young, but he had served the Lady Mormont faithfully until her death, and when he’d asked to stay in Winterfell by his Queen’s side, Sansa had accepted.

She misses Brienne, frightfully so, but Sansa misses everybody.

“Take me down.”

Allister leads her to the elevator, and they descend quietly.

“How long has it been since you saw him?” Allister asks.

Sansa had been irritated with his impertinence, at first, at his soft questions and his thoughtful opinions, but over time she has grown to cherish it. She has so little left to her now.

“Years.”

“And if he’s not here?”

Sansa can’t reply.

Allister doesn’t say anything more. He’s known, more than most, how much she’s struggled since the Wars. Oh, she’d become Queen to an independent North, continuing on the tradition that her beloved Robb had set, and she is proud to serve her people.

But she longs for something more.

When the elevator creaks to a stop, the men at the bottom bow gracefully to her. They’re her own men. No matter that the King and his Hand had reinstated the Night’s Watch, it doesn’t exist, not truly. Castle Black is abandoned. Any man still in the Watch truly lives further North.

She’s not brought too many people with her. She’s here under the guise of work, of course, but she’s only ever been party to these meetings once before. The first time they’d happened.

He hadn’t come.

And so she hadn’t come after that, either.

The trading between the Free Folk and North is a prosperous affair, the North giving silks and spices and oils in return for furs and knowledge and hardy meat. This is one of Sansa’s easier alliances, and while it’s also the easiest to attend, it brings her the most heartache. Petty squabbling and demands she can deal with, even if they bring headaches.

This particular alliance reminds her of all she has lost.

When the gates creak open, Sansa stands tall and proud and berates herself for hoping that this one time she’s come, he might be coming, too.

She spots Tormund first.

His face is gleeful, and he almost bounds to her with his joy.

“The girl kissed by fire!” he crows.

He doesn’t embrace her, because he knows better, but she almost wishes he would. She wants that connection to her past.

Instead, he puts a meaty paw on her shoulder. “I’m surprised you’ve come after all this time,” he says. “He’s always unbearable after these meetings, what with you not being here and all. Oh, thank _fuck_ I won’t have to deal with his pouting this time!”

“Tormund,” she whispers, fiercely, harshly, because she can’t believe what he’s saying. That way only sadness lies. “Who?”

He blinks at her, confused, lip twitched up as if to say _what the fuck._ “Jon, of course.”

Tormund moves out of her line of sight, and suddenly she can’t breathe.

_Jon._

She’s stuck where she’s stood. After all this time, all her longing, now that he’s here, he’s really here, she can’t move.

It’s no matter, in the end.

He can.

He sweeps her into his arms, knocking the breath from her as he does. Her words die in her throat, her lips parted in shock as he grasps at her, a choked, “ _Oh, Sansa,_ ” ripping from his throat.

He pulls back from her after a moment, when she does little more than stand limp against him, but as soon as his warmth has left her the damn breaks and she cries out and reaches back for him.

She doesn’t know if she’s crying, though she suspects that she must be. She can feel him shuddering against her.

When they finally pull from each other, Jon runs a hand down the back of her head.

“You look well,” he speaks, voice gruff and deep and oh how she’s missed his northern brogue.

“So do you.”

And he does. He looks sad, as sad as he had that day he’d left King’s Landing, and he looks old, too, but his cheeks are full and his hair is clean and even under all these furs she can still feel the hard planes of his muscles.

Sansa turns to her guard. “Allister, I’m going to go talk with Jon. Stay here with the party, alright? We’ll trade and negotiate tomorrow.”

She takes Jon by the hand, and leads him to the Lord Commander’s chambers.

He kneels by the hearth to start the fire, while Sansa watches him. The room is dusty, completely unused. She doesn’t know what this means. He’s obviously never spent any time here whatsoever, but why? Because he’s traumatized by what happened to him here? Because he genuinely wants to be beyond the Wall?

“Jon.”

He stops adding wood to the hearth, back bowing lower into the ground.

“Do you want to come home?”

He whimpers, fingers clenching around the log.

“ _Yes._ ”

Sansa lets her eyes flutter closed. She’ll make it happen. There are thousand things she can say; the North is independent and the Watch is under _her_ jurisdiction, Jon is a Stark and his fate is up to her, Bran will release him from his vows in any case she’s sure, and who’s to stop her, really, the Unsullied gone –

The floor creaks.

She opens her eyes, and Jon is standing in front of her.

“But not yet.”

“ _Not yet_?” she snaps, suddenly exhausted and furious and it feels like her heart is breaking all over again.

“Aye,” he says softly. “Not yet. I don’t deserve to come home yet.”

“What penance do you think you’re paying?” she demands. “I don’t care what anyone says, killing her was the right thing –“

He winces.

She bites her tongue fiercely, letting the sharp flare anchor her.

She takes a deep breath.

“I know that you didn’t see what she did coming,” Sansa says, softer, quieter, with more understanding. “I didn’t either, truthfully. But that doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice.”

His chest rumbles.

“I know you loved her.”

He’s shaking his head before she can finish. “I didn’t,” he admits on a whisper. “I didn’t, not really, but I saw what she could do for us, and then I just got so _confused_ –“

He becomes frantic quickly, eyes going wild and shoulders heaving.

She hushes him, taking him back into her arms. She can’t help the relief that has unfurled in her chest, how it’s made her heart beat fast and quick as has made her stomach roil, but she will come back to it in a moment. For now, he’s unraveling before her.

“Alright, Jon,” she sooths. “Not yet.”

 

-

 

The first time Jon comes to Winterfell, Sansa wasn’t expecting him.

They meet at the Wall every two moon turns, an unnecessarily frequent amount to be trading and meeting with the Free Folk, but it as long as she can go without seeing him. Now that she’s had a taste for having him back in her arms, she can’t make herself let it go.

It seems that he can’t, either.

She’s still a fortnight from riding out to Castle Black, and she’s been preparing for it carefully. They’ve settled into a nice routine over the past year, but she wants more, now. She’d been going to ask for more.

(What that more was she hadn’t quite decided. It depended on how brave she felt. Would it be to ask him to come home? Would it be to see him more often? Would it be for her to ask him to press a sweet kiss against her skin? Or maybe she could be braver – maybe she could kiss him first, maybe fall into bed with him?)

She knows the Lord’s mutter about her and her wildling lover, and they perhaps even suspect the truth of his identity, but he’s not her lover, not really. She just wants him to be.

And then he comes to her. The horns blare and it sets her on edge, but when she arrives at the courtyard to see him and a small wildling party atop their horses, she almost trips over her feet in her rush to greet him.

“You’re here,” she whispers into his neck.

“I don’t want to cause any trouble,” he says back, “I’ll leave if this puts you in too much danger. I just – I wanted to see you.”

“No, don’t go,” she pleads, before she can help herself. She clings tighter to him.

“I won’t,” he promises.

When she leads him to her chamber, she knows that this time is different. They won’t just be sharing pretty words by the fire; they won’t just be working on forgiveness; they won’t just be mourning a future that was taken from them.

They’re writing their own stories tonight.

“I helped her conquer Westeros,” Jon says to her as the evening passes. “I defended her, even after she burnt the city.”

“You did,” Sansa says, because these are the crimes she has so much trouble forgiving. “But you passed the sentence and you swung the sword.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m worthy of getting to come home,” he says. “That doesn’t mean I’m worthy of loving you.”

She wishes his declaration of love didn’t have to be surrounded by so much sadness, but she knows why it does. She knows that this is the reason he hasn’t come home in so long.

Besides, they can have many more years where their love is sweet, where she can let it slip from her mouth without a care, freely, when they lay beside each other after a coupling or when they take their meals together or even just when she looks at him and is overcome.

“You’re trying to be,” she tells him instead of all of that. “But punishing yourself does not equate to repentance.”

“How would you let me find absolution?” he asks.

“Let you?” she repeats. “Absolution is something you must find yourself. I can’t tell you how to find it anymore than I can tell you that nothing bad will ever happen again. What I _can_ tell you, Jon, is that you won’t find it by carving yourself from the North, from our family. From me.”

“And you could forgive me?” he asks, voice wavering, eyes watering. “For what I did to the Kingdoms? What I did to _you_?”

“Will you give me a chance to try?”

 

-

 

It’s been five years since the Great Wars, and Sansa is sure of herself and her power. She knows that if she were to deem it so, she could make what she wanted happened.

She is too scared, however, to even chance angering the Six Kingdoms. The Unsullied are gone, and the Wall is _her_ territory, but if some of the lords were to get word that she’d not only pardoned Jon but taken him as a husband and is bearing his children – well. She’d not quite so sure they could let that happen just yet, and she won’t punish her Kingdom for her own desires.

So doesn’t, not yet. Sansa goes to him at Castle Black, or his settlement beyond the Wall, and he comes to Winterfell and she sees him so frequently that sometimes its like they’re hardly apart at all.

He always greets her with a fierce kiss, and if the whispers of the Queen in the North’s wilding lover were bad before, they’re insufferable now.

She won’t marry him now. Maybe she won’t be able to ever. But when her stomach starts to swell with her first child, she doesn’t mind that they’ll be a bastard. Not when she finds out, not when Jon arrives for the first time since she confirmed the pregnancy and his faces lights up with so much love and joy that all sadness disappears, and not when her daughter is born and she holds little Lyanna in her arms and tells her she is loved, so, so much.

Because she knows that her daughter _is_ loved.

Sansa knows that she is loved, too.


End file.
